Bigger government hurts growth by diverting resources from productive uses to political purposes. That’s common sense to most people. But it’s nice to find even academics at Harvard are confirming this relationship – and showing that having local politicians with seniority is bad for growth since it means even more wasteful spending. Excerpted below is the abstract of a new study from the Harvard Business School, and kudos to Veronique de Rugy, who alerted me to this report by putting up a post at National Reveiew’s Corner:

This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In doing so, we show that fiscal spending shocks appear to significantly dampen corporate sector investment and employment activity. These corporate reactions follow both Senate and House committee chair changes, are present among large and small firms and within large and small states, are partially reversed when the congressman resigns, and are most pronounced among geographically-concentrated firms. The effects are economically meaningful and the mechanism – entirely distinct from the more traditional interest rate and tax channels – suggests new considerations in assessing the impact of government spending on private sector economic activity.

Like this:

You don’t need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office “research” claiming that Obama’s so-called stimulus “increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million.” CBO’s analysis is a throwback to the widely discredited Keynesian theory that assumes you can enrich yourself by switching money from your left pocket to right pocket. For all intents and purposes, CBO wants us to believe their Keynesian model and ignore real world data. This is akin to the famous line attributed to Willie Nelson, who was caught with another woman by his wife and supposedly said, “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

Using its own Keynesian model, the White House last year said that wasting $800 billion was necessary to keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent. Yet the joblessness rate quickly jumped to 10 percent and remains stubbornly high. We’ve already beaten this dead horse (here, here, here, here, and here), in part because the White House has embarrassed itself even further with silly attempts to find some way of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse. This is why Obama Administration estimates have evolved from “jobs created” to “jobs saved” to “jobs financed.”

The CBO’s most recent “calculations” are just another version of the same economic alchemy. But don’t believe me. Buried at the end of the report is this passage, where CBO basically admits that its new “research” simply plugged new spending numbers into its Keynesian formula. This sounds absurd, and it is, but don’t forget that these are the same geniuses that predicted that a giant new healthcare entitlement would reduce long-run budget deficits.

CBO’s current estimates of the impact of ARRA on output and employment differ slightly from those presented in its February 2010 report primarily because the agency has revised its estimates of ARRA’s impact on federal spending on the basis of new information. Outlays resulting from ARRA in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 were higher than the amount that CBO projected in February 2010 in preparing its estimate of the law’s likely impact on output and employment, primarily because a larger-than-expected amount of refundable tax credits was disbursed in the first quarter rather than later in the year. That change makes the estimated impact of ARRA on output and employment in the first quarter slightly higher than what CBO projected in February.

Ever wonder why unions care so much about the minimum wage when almost all union members get paid above that level? The answer is simply, but sleazy. As Walter Williams explains, they want to protect their high-pay status by increasing the cost of lower-skilled workers. For all intents and purposes, they are pricing poor people out of the job market:

Labor unions are the major supporters of increases in the minimum wage. Even though the overwhelming majority of their members earn multiples of the minimum wage, they spend millions upon millions lobbying for minimum wage increases. They do it because higher minimum wages protect their members from competition with low-skill, low-wage workers. Most other minimum wage supporters are decent people with a concern for low-wage workers, but their actions suffer from a misguided vision of how the world operates.